Sam Amidon has released his take on Taj Mahal's "Light Rain Blues," the second track from his forthcoming, self-titled album, due October 23 on Nonesuch Records, and an accompanying video, directed by Will Miller. You can watch it here. Amidon performs in concert from Kings Place in London this Saturday, streaming live.

Lake Street Dive has released a new song, "Making Do," and an accompanying video, which you can watch here. "'Making Do' is about the world that future generations are inheriting," says the band. "We are all concerned about what is happening to our planet, so the song explores what arises when we consider both our role in it and our responsibility to address it. Hopefully it comes through as a rallying cry to do the best you can with what you have." The video comprises clips from fans and a cameo by Senator Ed Markey, a co-sponsor of the Green New Deal.

Rhiannon Giddens has teamed with composer Michael Abels (Get Out) and members of the Met Opera Chorus and Nashville Ballet for a new interpretation of her song "Cry No More," which she first wrote and released in the wake of the 2015 Charleston church shooting. Following the murder of Breonna Taylor, Giddens re-recorded the track to emphasize its timeliness with added fervor, as she makes a plea for unity against injustice. You can watch the new video here.

Dave Malloy's Octet, directed by Annie Tippe, is due to get its West Coast premiere in Berkeley Repertory Theatre's spring 2021 season, a co-production with NYC's Signature Theatre, which premiered Octet in 2019. "I'm so thrilled to be returning to Berkeley with Octet, and have this show continue to evolve under the care of two of my favorite theatres," says Malloy. "It's a wonderful extension of my Signature residency, bringing this work to another coast, in a theatre that will hopefully by then be filled with smiling, healthy, socially close theatregoers.” The original cast recording is available on Nonesuch.

Congratulations to Gaby Moreno and Van Dyke Parks, whose 2019 Nonesuch album, ¡Spangled!, has been nominated for a Latin Grammy Award for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. ¡Spangled! celebrates the migration of song across the Americas, spanning more than a century, including a bolero from Panama, a bossa nova from Brazil, a song by Moreno, Trinidadian songwriter David Rudder's "The Immigrants," and an elegiac ballad from the Southwest US: Ry Cooder, John Hiatt, and Jim Dickinson’s “Across the Borderline." Winners will be announced on November 19.

Mountain Man has released Mountain Man Sings Simple Gifts, the latest in its series of cover singles, featuring its version of the Shaker hymn. "'Simple Gifts' is one of those incredible songs that transforms you while you sing it,” says the trio. "It's like an incantation, and it was a joy to record."

Sarah Kirkland Snider "asserts her own musical personality as a composer who knows instinctively how to write for the human voice," says Tom Huizenga in his review of her Mass for the Endangered on NPR's All Things Considered, which you can hear here. "Both the choir [Gallicantus] and the 12-member orchestra, conducted by Gabriel Crouch, respond to Snider's music with richly tailored performances ... Through her smart and resplendent exploration of age-old musical formulas, Snider's eco-inspired Mass for the Endangered is a blast from the past that resonates profoundly in the present."

Joachim Cooder, whose Nonesuch debut album, Over That Road I'm Bound, is out this Friday, will perform a series of virtual in-store performances via Instagram Live of several US independent record stores this week. The sets begin on the Instagram of Music Millennium Records in Portland, OR, tonight, followed by Salzer's Records in Ventura, Grimey's in Nashville, Boo Boo Records in San Luis Obispo, and Electric Fetus in Minneapolis on release day. Details here.

The soundtrack to the Tim Burton–directed film of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, first released on Nonesuch in 2007, will receive its first-ever vinyl edition on November 13, 2020, in a two-LP set, available to pre-order now. The film, which won the Golden Globe for Best Picture, is an adaptation by John Logan of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s musical, starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and the late Alan Rickman. "Something close to a masterpiece, a work of extreme—I am tempted to say evil—genius," exclaimed the New York Times' A.O. Scott. "This Sweeney is a bloody wonder," raved Rolling Stone's Peter Travers, "intimate and epic, horrific and heart-rending as it flies on the wings of Sondheim's most thunderously exciting score."

Composer Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Mass for the Endangered, is out now on New Amsterdam and Nonesuch Records. A video for “Alleluia” from the Mass, the third video for the project made by Deborah Johnson / CandyStations, can be seen here. Snider’s Mass, with a libretto by poet/writer Nathaniel Bellows, is a celebration of, and an elegy for, the natural world—animals, plants, insects, the planet itself—an appeal for greater awareness, urgency, and action. Originally commissioned by Trinity Church Wall Street, this recording features the English vocal ensemble Gallicantus conducted by Gabriel Crouch.

Tristan Perich’s Drift Multiply, for 50 violins and 50-channel 1-bit electronics, will be released November 13, 2020, on New Amsterdam and Nonesuch Records, and is available to preorder now. The piece, Perich’s largest work to date, is conducted by Douglas Perkins. Scored as one hundred individual lines of music, the piece blends violins and speakers into a cascading tapestry of tone, harmony, and noise. The violins perform from sheet music, while the speakers are each connected to custom-built circuit boards programmed to output 1-bit audio, the most basic digital waveforms made of just ones and zeroes.

k.d. lang's 2008 Nonesuch album, Watershed, declared "a masterpiece" by the Times, will be released on vinyl for the first time on November 20, and is available to pre-order now. As the title suggests, Watershed represented a milestone in lang’s career. For the first time, she assumed the role of producer, as well as writer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist. “Watershed is like a culmination of everything I’ve done," lang said; "there’s a little bit of jazz, a little country, a little of the Ingénue sound, a little Brazilian touch ... I didn’t feel the need to be genre-specific because this experience felt so wide open."